Fox News Watch

Osama bin Laden routinely referred to his main Western enemies as “crusaders.” Conservative-bashing author Neal Gabler, the longtime Fox News Watch panelist, adapted OBL’s analogy in a Thursday Salon piece that originally ran at BillMoyers.com. Gabler also griped that if most Americans don’t understand just how fanatical Republicans are, blame the media.

“For three decades,” Gabler commented, “the MSM have been collaborators with the GOP, pretending” that it’s “a normal party,” when it’s really “closer to a religious cult…It operates on dogma, sees compromise as a moral failing, [and] views enemies as pagans who must be vanquished…That isn’t politics; it’s a modern version of the medieval Crusades, and as the ancient Crusades did to Europe, it has inflicted untold damage on our country.”

Neal Gabler is an author and cultural critic who may be best known to NewsBusters readers as a longtime panelist on Fox News Watch. On Friday, lefty sites such as BillMoyers.com and Salon ran an article by Gabler in which he argued that for several decades, the mainstream media have greased the skids for movement conservatism and the Republican party.

For example, Gabler asserted that after President Reagan took office, the MSM “seemed to lose its nerve [as] the Republican Party lurched not just rightward, but extremist-ward…The media behaved as if extremism were business as usual.” Nowadays, Gabler contended, the GOP is “quite possibly America’s primary institutional force of bigotry, intellectual dishonesty, ignorance, warmongering, intractability and cruelty against the vulnerable and powerless.”

The Cardinal couldn't have been more polite, but it didn't take much reading between the lines to get what he was asserting: that when it comes to the encyclical on the environment, Rush Limbaugh doesn't understand what the Pope was saying.

On today's Fox News Sunday, Chris Wallace played a clip of Rush saying that the encyclical "is suggesting is that everyone should vote for the Democrat party. How in the hell else do you interpret it when the Pope sounds like Al Gore on global warming and climate change?" Responded Cardinal Donald Wuerl: "one of the great blessings of America" is that "we're all allowed to speak our mind even if we don't have all the facts. Even if we don't have a clear view of what the other person is saying."

Kirsten Powers said something Saturday that should deeply embarrass so-called journalists across the fruited plain.

Appearing on Fox News Watch, Powers - who was Deputy Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Public Affairs in the Clinton administration - said of the job the current White House is doing with the Benghazi cover up, "Bill Clinton would not have gotten away with this" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

On Thursday, Ratner published an article titled "George W. Bush Has Saved More Lives Than Any American President" that is guaranteed to shock the heck out of you as it angers folks on her side of the aisle:

As NewsBusters reported last week, America's media were in total swoon mode over Hillary Clinton following her testimony before Congress.

On Saturday, syndicated columnist Cal Thomas said of their behavior on Fox News Watch, "They're going to part the waters like Moses did the Red Sea to give her a clear path to be the first woman president...They treated [Barack Obama] as a Messiah, they’re going to treat her as the Virgin Mary" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

On Saturday's Fox News Watch, as the panel discussed the media's lack of attention to revelations that the Obama administration knew that the attack on the U.S. consulate in Libya was a pre-planned terrorist attack in spite of dismissing the event as a protest that got out of hand, left-leaning FNC analyst Kirsten Powers declared that the media have had a "really disturbing lack of curiosity" about the episode, adding that they "should be holding" the Obama administration's "feet to the fire in a a serious way."

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